Backend Software Development Engineer

About the Job

This posting advertises potential job opportunities. The exact role may not be open currently, but may open soon. If you apply, a Cisco representative may contact you directly if a relevant position opens.

Meet The Team

Cisco Spaces is the intelligence layer transforming buildings into dynamic, data-driven environments. By integrating with Cisco's global network of access points, sensors, and cameras, Spaces provides real-time insights and automation to help organizations operate safer, smarter, and more sustainable workplaces.

Spaces is one of Cisco’s fastest-growing platforms, with over twelve billion square feet of real estate digitized worldwide. As Cisco progresses into a software-first future, Spaces is central to cloud, IoT, maps, analytics, and AI. The platform combines everything needed for a modern hybrid workplace, offering live occupancy and utilization insights, indoor maps, bookings, visitor flows, environmental and air-quality data, people and asset visibility, and automated workflows to improve operational efficiency. Customers manage building portfolios, connect third-party solutions through our partner ecosystem, and use APIs to build new use cases on the platform.

Spaces bridges large-scale cloud engineering, real-time data, AI, and enterprise UX. Our team ships quickly, innovates constantly, and develops technology that genuinely changes how buildings function.

Visit our website to learn more.

Your Impact

As a Backend Software Engineer on the Cisco Spaces team, you will shape the core systems that power one of Cisco’s fastest-growing platforms. You'll build high-scale services that process billions of events, enable real-time building intelligence, and deliver reliable services globally.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and deploy backend services handling massive scale, high concurrency, and global reliability.
• Develop end-to-end systems in Java with a focus on performance, stability, and clean architecture.
• Create APIs and microservices for real-time occupancy, mapping, automation, IoT integrations, and analytics across enterprise sites.
• Collaborate with frontend, product, and platform teams for seamless feature delivery across cloud, IoT, mapping, and AI layers.
• Optimize data pipelines, storage models, and streaming systems for live telemetry from millions of connected devices.
• Introduce new technologies, frameworks, and design patterns to improve engineering practices.
• Contribute to platform initiatives like scalability improvements, security enhancements, and refining deployment and CI/CD practices.
• Learn and apply emerging AI and automation techniques to improve system intelligence and developer efficiency.
• Own features from concept to rollout and ensure quality, reliability, and performance.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Engineering or Computer Science.
• Minimum of two years' experience building backend systems and web applications in production environments.
• Strong server-side Java expertise, with experience in J2EE, Vert.x, or Kotlin-based services.
• Deep understanding of Java fundamentals, including threading, concurrency, synchronization, collections, generics, annotations, and JVM internals.
• Familiarity with inter-thread communication, serialization, and performance tuning of high-throughput services.
• Strong grasp of object-oriented programming, data structures, algorithms, and design patterns.
• Experience building scalable REST APIs, backend services, and microservice architectures.
• Working knowledge of NoSQL databases and distributed data models.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar streaming platforms.
• Experience building and operating services in large-scale cloud environments (e.g., AWS).
• Proficiency with Maven or Gradle, Git, Jenkins, CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts (service discovery, fault tolerance, event-driven architectures).
• Ability to work in agile teams and drive technical decisions.
• Comfort using modern AI development tools.
• Ability to learn new frameworks and technologies quickly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing and operating microservices at scale using Java, Vert.x, or Kotlin in high-throughput, low-latency environments.
• Hands-on experience running workloads on AWS (EKS, EC2, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, Lambda).
• Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm).
• Experience building streaming or event-driven architectures using Kafka.
• Experience troubleshooting distributed systems.
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing pipelines, observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK), and production monitoring.
• Ability to analyze complex systems and make thoughtful tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted developer tools.
• Experience driving process improvements and influencing engineering best practices.
• Strong analytical mindset.
• Exposure to building secure, compliant, and resilient cloud-native systems.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and contribute effectively in cross-functional teams.
• Passion for continuous learning.

Why Cisco?

At Cisco, we're revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. We experiment and create meaningful solutions, with a worldwide network of experts, and the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.